I did something yesterday that I'd never done: I went out shooting with two camera bodies.

I often go out shooting with one body and many lenses, changing lenses upwards of 70 times on a long and interesting outing, and this works well for what I like to do, but when I added the Nikon D4 to my Nikon D700 at the start of the summer, I specifically thought it might be nice to have two bodies when out among the festive crowds at Kyoto's Gion Matsuri festival, one body with the huge Nikkor 300mm f/2, and another with a [...]

Finally getting that all-consuming project that I just posted about off my back, I can now return to my photos. Here are a few from the ikebana (flower arranging) event I went to a couple of weeks ago at the Shoren'in Temple (青蓮院) in eastern Kyoto. I'd managed to post a few shots earlier (in my "busy hallway", "cute and colorful scene ", and "serene photos" posts).

This event was related to the flower-arranging events that I post about every year, but it was a special event to mark the ascendancy of a new head of all worldwide practitioners of [...]

What a difference a day makes.

Yesterday I had such a wonderful, inspiring time at the ikebana show at the Shoren'in Temple; today was great until the evening when I had the mind-numbing, soul-sucking experience of spending four hours on half a dozen travel web sites trying to find reasonable tickets for Fumie and her folks to visit my folks this winter when Anthony and I are already visiting.

Through the process I became intimately familiar with global flight schedules, but was unable to produce an itinerary that combined the best flights for us... every travel web site I checked [...]

I had an amazing afternoon at an ikebana (flower-arranging) show held at the Shoren'in Temple. 600 photos to sift through.... above is one that caught my eye.

Continued here...

Dipping into the several metric tons of pixels that I want to post but have yet to barely even look at myself, a short trip back to late April, to a visit to the Joshoko-ji Temple (常照皇寺, more properly transliterated in English as "Joushoukou-ji") with Paul Barr and Nicolas Joannin. It was an amazing place, though the harsh sunlight of the hot spring day made for photographic challenges.

I did post just a few shots the day after the trip, in "Pretty As a Peach Blossom", and some time later some shots that happened to be from that outing to [...]